The European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) will reshape how citizens authenticate themselves online. But a critical question remains unresolved: who pays for the trust services that make the system work?
The revised eIDAS regulation envisions robust private sector participation, but it offers little guidance on how commercial actors such as trust service providers, wallet issuers and validation intermediaries will be compensated. Without viable payment mechanisms, the EUDIW could become a government-funded monolith, potentially stifling innovation and scalability.
Speaking at the 11th Trust Services and eID Forum, Jon Ølnes of Signicat warned that the wallet’s architectural diagrams, filled with interconnected service components (“boxes”), may obscure a deeper economic challenge. “If this is going to work,” he said, “each of these boxes needs a sustainable business model.”
Ølnes outlined two broad funding models: one driven by commercial payments, the other by government. But he cautioned against relying solely on public funding. Unless trust service providers get paid, there will be no trust services, he said, pointing to the absence of qualified electronic attestations of attributes (QEAAs) as a potential consequence.
The question of who pays — wallet providers, EAA issuers, qualified signature providers — remains open. Ølnes envisioned a flexible ecosystem where payment responsibility could fall to different actors depending on the use case. In some scenarios, the source of the attribute, such as a government agency, might pay to simplify complexity. In others, the user might pay for premium credentials. Service providers could also bear the cost of attestations, potentially compensating users. Alternatively, governments might contract one or more Q(E)AA providers directly.
Ølnes argued the relying party, as the entity that benefits most from verified attributes, should bear the cost. “We shouldn’t limit this,” he said. “We need an ecosystem where all these actors can pay each other as needed.”
Yet the current EUDIW infrastructure lacks the protocols to support such transactions. There are no embedded payment mechanisms, no metadata to indicate cost or recipient, and no contractual obligations to pay. The challenge of combining unlinkability with payment transparency further complicates matters.
One proposed solution is the creation of a clearinghouse — a neutral intermediary that handles payments based on pricing metadata, without revealing the nature of the attestation. Smart contracts could automate payments upon validation, but this would require significant changes to existing protocols. Ølnes suggested that intermediaries will be crucial in the medium term, enabling service providers to consume EUDIW services without overhauling the infrastructure.
Technical work is already underway. ETSI has begun developing the Extended Validation Services Framework (TR 119 479-2), which includes provisions for payment metadata, attestation rulebooks, and mechanisms to trigger billable events without compromising privacy.
In the short term, Ølnes sees compliance-driven deployments dominated by government-issued credentials and minimal business innovation. Intermediaries will be essential to bridge service providers with wallet infrastructure and payment flows. But governments, he noted, are “notoriously bad at sales and marketing.”
The long-term vision is more ambitious: a competitive, usage-based ecosystem where private investment fuels the creation of new credential types, issuers, and use cases. As early adopters demonstrate process efficiencies and public acceptance grows, competitive pressure will drive innovation. The result could be a thriving marketplace for digital credentials, with exponential growth in user uptake and use cases.
For the EUDI Wallet to succeed, Ølnes concluded, it must evolve into a dynamic ecosystem, where trust is not just a public good but a service worth paying for.
